The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
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Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#2I wonder if you could power something of this? If the fungus have some type of melanin that will turn ionized radiation into energy, could we then use that to power something of background radiation?
Also interesting to see how close this fungi will grow to the radiation source, or will it be able to mutate to completely envelop the radiation source.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#3I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra.
- If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture
- That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material.
- Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial ≈ 3.15 kJ 10% of that is 315 J per gram
The result is that:
The amount of radiation energy available is 4 orders of magnitude too small to power even a 10% growth boost.
Edit: updated with more accurate estimations.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#4I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…
There's another parameter worth considering - how efficient is it to convert sunlight vs. gamma radiation into biologically usable energy.
What if for some reason gamma radiation changes the equilibrium constants for ADP --> ATP?
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#5How do you eat something you can’t see? It’s like eating electricity
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#6I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…
Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#7How do you eat something you can’t see? It’s like eating electricity
Or sunlight.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#8> Zhdanova suspected that the melanin of these fungi was acting as a shield against ionising radiation.
Wouldn't that be very easy to measure? My guts tell me that using the melanin as a shield against gamma radiation has a negligible effect, if any at all.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#9I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete.
For example:
> Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial
based on what?
Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
#10I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.